by Raja Alem
Nora hesitated, wondering whether to escape. Was it the unhinged gleam in the woman’s eyes, or the newfound recklessness that had taken hold of her that had Nora so excited? Nora wanted to be swept to the very limit of danger. She followed the woman through the calm emptiness of the mosque silently.
The dark red sunset pooled in bloodlike darkness between the successive keyhole arches. Nora avoided looking up at them; they looked like open doorways leading to death. The woman’s besieging eyes could read her reaction to the call of the place and its spirits.
The nine square vaults on the ceiling followed their steps like the eyes of giants. The woman made Nora stop and listen beneath each vault; Nora stole furtive glances at the beautiful square structures, not daring to look closer for fear she’d be sucked into their darkness. Stopping Nora under a vault that featured a seven-pointed star, the woman forced her to look twice, and said, “Before we go any further, remember that what I’m about to reveal to you concerns the rivalry between our two great ancestors: mine, Samuel ibn Nagrela, and yours, Ali ibn Hazm. The Jew and the Muslim, who both believed that man’s fall did not take place when Adam and Eve fell from Paradise but when Cordoba fell and the centuries of harmony that had existed between the different religions was lost.” It dawned on Nora that the woman was speaking to her in fluent Arabic.
“You’re not imagining it. My Jewish ancestors used languages as the key to their fortunes, and one of those languages was your own. My ancestor Samuel displayed a remarkable talent for the Arabic language and calligraphy. That was what brought about the great change in his fortunes.” Nora sealed off her thoughts against this woman who seemed to be able to read them so easily.
“After the fall of the Berber kingdom and the wars between the party kings, the two men’s fates took different paths as they each searched for a door that would take them to the Paradise they’d lost here on earth. Ibn Hazm sought refuge near Seville, mourning Cordoba and its green revolution, and the destruction of its massive library, for which caravan-loads of books on astronomy, astrology, the sciences, and nature had been brought all the way from Baghdad. Ibn Hazm chased the dream of a resurrected Caliphate and the universal civilization it had nurtured. He believed that it was key to the door of Paradise and that was what made him side with the underdog in every conflict. He spent his life between exile and prison, an itinerant; after he was released, he isolated himself to write—on theology, matters of doctrine, and philosophy, trying to record the contents of that great lost library. He was way ahead of his time. He wrote a series of books comparing the three religions—the key to the faiths—which culminated in his book The Necklace of the Dove. Love was the only thing that could bridge the gaps between people, he discovered.
“Ibn Nagrela, on the other hand, was a physician from Cordoba, who was welcomed by the royal court in Granada, an Andalusian city that was home to the largest mixed community of Jews and Muslims. He lived two lives: one, in Arabic, as the ruler’s secretary and general of the Granadan army, leading campaigns against the neighboring kingdoms; and another in Hebrew, the language of his community in which he wrote poetry. Both men mourned the loss of their earthly Paradise in al-Andalus, the end of coexistence. They both spread the wisdom of eleventh-century Cordoba, whose scholars had been killed and whose library had been destroyed.”
The woman brought her face right up to Nora’s, engulfing her in heavy chamomile breaths.
“Both our ancestors left us their version of the key to Paradise: Ibn Hazm gave us The Necklace of the Dove and Ibn Nagrela his son Joseph, who inherited his father’s poetry and carried on his ideals and his obsession with Eden. He believed that translation was the solution to the puzzle of the absolute mind, or absolute Paradise. Translation would preserve the dialogue that had taken place between civilizations when Islamic rule flourished in al-Andalus. That gave us the Jewish Golden Age in the kingdoms of Northern Andalusia and the transfer of scientific knowledge to Europe. My ancestor Joseph’s translations opened the door to the world. I was obsessed with him when I was younger—this man who, it is said, was slaughtered along with thousands of other Jews in the streets of Cordoba when contact between religions became a crime known as heresy.” Half-hidden in the darkness, the woman led Nora forward, gradually but firmly, toward the apse, her chamomile-laden breaths intensifying Nora’s concealed longing for the place.
“Joseph provoked his enemies—he wasn’t as humble as his father—and people say that he was killed for it, crucified along with the members of a hundred and fifty Jewish families. The truth is, though, that Joseph managed to escape Granada. According to the story, he went in search of a door that had been revealed to him in a vision, in Aden, at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula.” The lights suddenly went out, and the woman pushed Nora into the apse, closing the door behind them. The darkness swallowed them.
“Sit on the ground. Lean back and look at the sky above and below …” Nora found herself being pushed down into the darkness, where she sat with her back against what felt like stairs carved into the wall. Meanwhile, the woman had vanished, and Nora began to think she’d been left there to die. Her body felt so drugged by the darkness she couldn’t even bring herself to get up to look for a way out.
The temple receded into deeper and deeper darkness, to the quickening thump of her heartbeats. The cold floor gnawed at her body through her light dress. Suddenly a shaft of light from the setting sun poured through a central window, illuminating the double rows of golden windows that went all the way around the wall of the temple. The round body of the temple came to life, flooding the space around Nora with rose-colored gold. Nora thought, for a moment, that the sunset was cascading into the temple like a waterfall, and she couldn’t be sure whether the temple was shooting upward into the sky or plummeting down into the earth to burst through to the sky on the other side of the planet. The inside of the temple was engulfed in a pink halo that revealed narrow steps carved in a spiral around the wall; they couldn’t have been there for climbing because they were too narrow and there was no banister. It took a while for Nora to make out the sunlit patches on the walls: from the ground to the sky, the wall was covered not with windows but with brightly colored doors that looked tiny from below and were covered in engravings that deceived the eye in the evening light, which was rosy in some places, bloody in others, and elsewhere absent, leaving an ominous pitch-blackness. Nora blinked, unsure of what she was seeing, and in that split second, the rectangular patches dissolved and whirled into the form of a single, huge door open to the sky above.
“This is what Joseph, who bore the dream of Samuel ibn Nagrela, saw when he finished his nighttime vigil outside Solomon’s Seal near Aden.”
The sun dipped behind the mountains and the temple was plunged into darkness, complete and thick, like a living thing; the darkness embraced Nora, who had no choice but to slump back, feeling the chamomile breaths flow from the fading church murals outside. A distinctive smell—from her childhood—filled Nora’s senses, bringing tears to her eyes. It was just like the smell of the qat the Yemenis chewed at sunset to get high—the woman was trying to drug her, she was certain of it. Her limbs felt heavy and sagged into the ground, and her vision was blurry. She could see through things, and through her own body, which was disintegrating and diffusing into the layers of darkness. It gradually become one with the darkness, and she began to hear distant voices speaking in Arabic; was it the woman resuming her story on the other side of the closed door, or was the story itself flowing through her, as if she were walking through an absolute mind that stretched into the past. Maybe it was the mind of Joseph ibn Nagrela as he stepped out onto the deck of the ship that plowed the Red Sea on its way to the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Yemeni singing rose around him as the crew moored the ship. The waves lapped at Joseph ibn Nagrela’s feet as he stood alone on the seashore at the port of Aden, carrying nothing but the robe on his back, lost in thought and fingering in his pocket the damp, salt-encrusted scrap of pape
r that bore a drawing of the door.
A stranger woke him up after he’d spent two days sleeping, hungry and forgotten on the beach, licked by the tide. “Brother, go find some shade from this sun!” He gradually became aware of the Arabic words and realized that someone was trying to coax him to consciousness. As soon as he had woken, Joseph pulled the drawing out of his pocket and thrust it at the stranger, gesturing toward the golden door. “This is what I’m looking for.”
Salt-soaked Arabic words flooded from his mouth, reminding him that it had been months since he’d spoken to another human being. Traveling in the infernal hold of one of the ships of the invading Portuguese fleet was like being incubated in a womb from hell.
“It came to me in a dream, a door between heaven and earth. I searched and searched and found that this city, Aden at the base of the Arabian Peninsula, is the gateway to the village of Solomon’s Seal, which contains every door on earth. That’s why your city is called ‘Aden’—because it leads to those doors …”
For days, Joseph ibn Nagrela traveled across the land of Yemen, repeating the story in an Arabic too heavy for the simple people he met to understand; still, the moment they set eyes on that drawing of the door, they realized that he was a man possessed by thoughts of a world other than theirs.
He kept repeating the story until one day he crossed paths with a beggar. “Happy Solomon at your service,” the man greeted him merrily. When Happy Solomon clapped eyes on the door, he fell silent, listening to his genies and subjecting Joseph to careful scrutiny, then said, “My tongue speaks the tongues of all those who believe, every language on earth spoken by men who breathe, even the speech of beasts, so accept my wisdom. I’m a miniature version of the prophet Solomon himself!” He examined the drawing with the help of his genies and explained, “What you are seeking is beyond the destiny of Eve’s sons. My genies speak of a mountain of doors, but there none of those doors will open for a living human.”
“Will they open for a dead person?”
“My genies know about life, nothing else. Don’t tire them out with your riddles about death.”
In the face of Joseph ibn Nagrela’s determination, Solomon the Happy assented to be his guide to the Hadramawt Valley. On foot, they crossed the happy mountains of Yemen, avoiding Seiyun and its famous market where craftsmen sold their products, including doors. Joseph nevertheless saw many Seiyuni women in their wide straw hats and brocade-embellished dresses, stopping travelers with songs and dances and inviting them to come to the market; they tried to tempt Joseph himself to buy one of their doors.
Happy Solomon also avoided al-Hajarayn, the town in the mountains famous for its beekeepers and their curative honey, warning Joseph, “You can say goodbye to your door if you drown in the honey of al-Hajarayn. The mountain’s like our mother Eve, who opened her legs to tempt Adam from Paradise.”
They avoided Shibam, climbing the mountains facing it so as to look across the Hadramawt Valley from their peaks. The city was filled with towering mud buildings of five, six, seven stories, which stood like a crowd of giants gathered in a space of no more than five hundred meters across, destruction masochists, so fragile was their position on the plain, which was constantly at the mercy of mountain floods.
“You must pass by the reservoir of underground water before you reach the temples,” advised Happy Solomon. He led Joseph ibn Nagrela to the outskirts of Ma’rib, a city that stood on the remains of the Great Dam and was known as the “city astride the two gardens of paradise.”
“I will leave you here to continue your journey,” said Happy Solomon. “If you’re fortunate, the lord of the genies and birds will permit you to enter the village of Solomon’s Seal.” He vanished then and there, as if he’d never existed.
Joseph ibn Nagrela found himself alone, standing between the two temples—Baran, temple of the sun, which was also known as the throne of Bilqis, Queen of Sheba, and Awam, temple of the moon, which was known as Bilqis’ Sanctuary. He looked out on the vast sand sea that was the Empty Quarter.
The first night fell pitch black, erasing Joseph’s features, forming deep pools of shadow in the valley and hovering over the temple of the moon, revealing to Joseph the place where lovers from all over the Arabian Peninsula came to die. As night proceeded, the nine-meter-high crescent-shaped temple wall, carved from a single block of stone, came to life. It emerged out of the great sand guarded by eight eastward-facing pillars inlaid with seashells or moonshells, which invited him to enter, luring him into the Holy of Holies whose translucent marble walls were woven out of silver and gold and precious stones.
Joseph spent his nights in a trance between the four columns of the Holy of Holies, listening to the two tableaux that stood seven meters above the ground on either side of the entrance, whispering prayers for love and prosperity, begging the Queen of Sheba to materialize out of the milky sand, naked and as lithe as the moonlight, which gleamed on the temple floor as she walked on tiptoe to take up her ceremonial gown of shimmering silver that left her shoulders and arms bare, two slits running from the top of her thighs to her bare feet. Wearing her crown, she then approached her seat among the stone seats that surrounded the stone table at the entrance of the Holy of Holies. The seats of mother sun and father moon and Venus were taken up as well as they all met to discuss how to lure back her lover Almaqa from Awam. The pale, translucent marble would light up with his presence, reflecting the faces of the resurrected lovers who had risen up from the graves that lay in row after row to the south and west of the temple.
Joseph spent his nights in a fever for Bilqis, listening and emptying his soul of everything but his longing for that door.
Finally, when the moon waned and withdrew, Joseph ibn Nagrela followed it, with the flood of lovers illuminated by Bilqis’ breaths, walking three kilometers to the west and crossing the plain of henna and coffee trees of the left garden of paradise, led by five pillars and a sixth broken pillar to the temple of the sun where he waded through the wide water channel to the south and then entered the gate to the main temple, crossing the vast courtyard, which was still alive with the echoes of feasts held in Almaqa’s honor. Inscriptions threatened curses on any thieves who dared to enter the sanctuary. He climbed the stairs in the courtyard to the huge dais to the Holy of Holies, where the bull planted its four-meter-high legs to fertilize the soil and the lovers.
Joseph spent his days deciphering pledges of love inscribed in cuneiform on the eastern columns of the dais and the offerings that lovers brought from the ends of the earth: jars of herbs, perfumes, incenses, silver that the lover-pilgrims laid along the length of the wall of the external courtyard and on both sides of the main gate. To Joseph the temple seemed a polished expanse of translucent alabaster, breathing in the sunlight and exuding a faint cinnamon-scented incense, a pool of goodness that healed his senses and filtered the light around him so that it magnified the image of the door inside him.
News of Joseph ibn Nagrela spread: they said he was a hermit who had brought to life the pilgrimages Bilqis and her lover Almaqa made to visit each other, traveling constantly between Baran and Awam, and had taken up residence in Almaqa’s Holy of Holies, where he received the lover-pilgrims who came to Almaqa seeking the moon’s spells and the farmers and shepherds who came seeking the sun’s. With the lust of a miser, Joseph ibn Nagrela devoted himself to receiving the pilgrims and collecting from their mouths and hearts their harvest songs and love poems, learning from their dances the primitive, animal, chest-splitting cries that begged a lover to be swayed, a plant to grow, a harvest to be enriched.
Joyful pilgrims traveled to see him from all over the Arab lands, to meet him between his two gardens of paradise, among the sweet clouds of song gathered around him, raining torrents over the Hadramawt Valley for three consecutive moons and showing Joseph the secret that gave that land its nickname, “the Happy Land of Yemen.”
On Joseph’s seventh sunrise between the two temples, he was awoken by the soft scent o
f incense, and when he opened his eyes, glittering strips of light on the horizon dazzled him. The mountain opposite looked like it was covered in solid gold bricks; when he looked more carefully, he could make out hundreds of doors covering the entire surface of the mountain. He rushed toward them blindly, desperate to get inside, but when he reached the mountain the doors had melted into one huge gate that was firmly closed against him. No matter how hard he knocked, no answer came. At sunset, the doors faded away and he wondered if it had all been a mirage; nevertheless he didn’t dare leave.
Dawn after dawn, those shining doors reappeared, but each time he approached they would be transformed into that single, closed gate. He got thinner and thinner, surviving only on the water and goat’s milk brought to him by the girls of Solomon’s Seal, near Ma’rib, girls who were the descendants of Solomon and Bilqis.
“These are doors between the parts of Creation,” they told him. “Between animal, vegetable, and mineral, between tongues, between life and death and God knows what else … Some of them opened for the prophet King Solomon, and that’s how he earned the name “King of the Genies,” but those doors have never opened for another living being. It all comes down to keys. You’ll have to find the original key before you start dreaming about one of those doors opening for you!”
The sun peeled Joseph’s skin and grilled his flesh a dark, aromatic teak while the moon polished him to a silver gleam; his coal-black braids grew longer. He was getting thinner still, as thin as a key, but whenever he approached a door, the closed gate would stand in his way. At the age of seventy, having never lost hope, he woke up to find that his seed had caused the bellies of the Solomon’s Seal girls to swell. When the pains of labor took them, and the ground of the two gardens shook, all he remembered was the first girl to be born. She had a moon-shaped birthmark on her palm. Joseph’s memory kept the sandstorm that had covered the mountain: when it finally abated, the mountain had vanished behind a veil that made it difficult to see; countless doors were scattered all over the valley bed and figures that looked like a band of beggars flocked from everywhere on earth and began to collect the doors, piling them up on a huge bonfire that they’d lit to help them see.
